Back in 1997, physicists performed an extraordinary experiment that will be forever remembered by researchers and Star Trek fans alike. In this demonstration, the team transported photons from one point in the universe to another without sending them through the space in between — the first successful teleportation in history.
Teleportation is the transfer of the information that describes one object to another object elsewhere in space. In effect, this second object takes on the identity of the first. A more precise description of the team’s experiment with photons is that they transferred the quantum information that describes the polarisation state of one photon to another photon.
Still impressive but not quite the teleportation of the entire photon, which has multiple quantum properties. All of these need to be teleported to recreate it exactly.
Since then, this kind of teleportation has become routine in quantum optics labs all over the world but always with the same limitation. All these experiments involve the transfer of a single quantum property. Nobody has ever found a way to transmit the multiple quantum properties of a single object at the same time and thereby truly teleport it.
Until now. Today, Xi-Lin Wang and buddies at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei say they have done just that. The team have worked out how to teleport two quantum properties of a single photon to another photon at the same time — the first time this has ever been done. The work is an important stepping stone towards the ultimate goal of teleporting complex objects such as atoms and small molecules in their entirety.
link.
No comments:
Post a Comment